Torrentz

[orbsycli]

How come mac computers can not download torrents fast?
Windows machines can download torrents @ break neck speed....
yet my mac can achieve 20 kb/s max.
my friend who owns a macbook also experiences this.

I'm just wondering....why?

[Drip Curl Magic]

are you downloading torrents with good health?

I'm on a pc and I usually don't get more than 15-20 kb/s per torrent.

I find that torrents tend to fluctuate a lot.
It'll be downloading at 1 kb/s for a while, then it'll go up to 20 kb/s for a half an hour or so before dying back down.

And then those are those rare moments where my download speed skyrockets to 100-200 kb/s.

It all depends on the peers that you connect to. sometimes there are no peers, sometimes there are many peers with limited to no connectivity.

Also, if you have a router, you need to forward the ports that you want to use

[alexander]

torrent speeds depend not on the OS, but on many factors that you may not even consider, but first you need to understand how a torrent network works:

Originally Posted by wiki

Users browse the web to find a torrent of interest, download it, and open it with a BitTorrent client. The client connects to the tracker(s) specified in the torrent file, from which it receives a list of peers currently transferring pieces of the file(s) specified in the torrent. The client connects to those peers to obtain the various pieces. Such a group of peers connected to each other to share a torrent is called a swarm. If the swarm contains only the initial seeder, the client connects directly to it and begins to request pieces. As peers enter the swarm, they begin to trade pieces with one another, instead of downloading directly from the seeder.

Clients incorporate mechanisms to optimize their download and upload rates; for example they download pieces in a random order, to increase the opportunity to exchange data, which is only possible if two peers have different pieces of the file.

The effectiveness of this data exchange depends largely on the policies that clients use to determine to whom to send data. Clients may prefer to send data to peers that send data back to them (a tit for tat scheme), which encourages fair trading. But strict policies often result in suboptimal situations, where newly joined peers are unable to receive any data (because they don't have any pieces yet to trade themselves) and two peers with a good connection between them do not exchange data simply because neither of them wants to take the initiative. To counter these effects, the official BitTorrent client program uses a mechanism called “optimistic unchoking,” where the client reserves a portion of its available bandwidth for sending pieces to random peers (not necessarily known-good partners, so called preferred peers), in hopes of discovering even better partners and to ensure that newcomers get a chance to join the swarm.

So, how can your download go slow:

a) there is only very few seeders, and many peers downloading, you will not be able to start getting data until you have some, and chances are you wont get the data that the other clients don't already have which will make you use only the bw given to random peers and that is usually not much at all

b) there is no seeders but only a bunch of peers, and there is more then one copy between them, so they are sharing it betwixt the peers, you connect, you dont have any pieces of the file, not a valuable node and you will be lucky to get 1k down until someone seeds

c) the client you use is not very torrent-intuitive and therefore you are not picking up all the bw you can pick up

And you also have to realize that many people that use torrents are punks who don't follow any laws of nature. They only stay on the torrent to download their copy and get out, forgetting that this is a sharing network, they negate that there may be other people that may want a copy, they just want their copy and dont value the value of sharing. If you are one, shame on you, sharing networks are about sharing, my general rule is, if i download a file through torrent, and i usually download legit files like live CD images and such, i dont disconnect until i share out at least 1.5 copies, 98% of the time, i stay till i've given back more then 2. Its all in what you take and what you give back, and some torrents have more correctly minded people then torrent punks, so some torrents are better then others.

What client do you use?

[orbsycli]

i've tried a few clients and they're all...very...slow
even with a lot of seeders

[alexander]

dont matter how many seeders, peers/seeders is question, seeder connection = 2

and exactly which clients have you tried?

[Jay-qu]

My fav client is Azureus, I have also heard bitlord is good

I have heard that even if all of the above is well, if your ISP so chooses they will hammer any ports in the range of usual torrent networks, to try and combat some of the illegal file transfers that go on.

Changing the port it runs on can help with this sometimes - but dont forget to open up the port on any firewalls you have and like Drip said forward it from your router.

[alexander]

i use transmission on os x, bittornado for linux (the python one, and i rarely use the gui), and µtorrent on windows.